The system essentially consists of two interfaces: the experimenters' view and the subjects' view. Experimenters create experiments which may consist of several sessions and invite subjects. Invited subjects may sign up for one of the experiments' sessions in order to participate.

Below we will briefly describe the procedure of organizing a laboratory experiment with ORSEE. A complete and fully detailed manual how to organize experiments is included in section The experimenter view.

When organizing a laboratory experiment, the experimenter first logs into the administration area and registers the experiment she wants to conduct. She enters the public and internal name of the experiment, the type of experiment, and may add a description and assign some experiment classes (tags). She assigns the experiment to herself and/or to other experimenters and chooses who should receive the automated experiment-related e-mails generated by the system. Then she schedules each of her planned sessions with date and time, laboratory, experiment duration, number of participants needed and over-recruited, the enrollment deadline, and when the reminder email should be sent to enrolled participants. Next, she assigns subjects from the subject pool to her experiment. When doing so, she can create conditions using different filters such as experience, experiment participation, number of no-shows, any demographic data collected, etc. She may also restrict selection to a random sub-sample. Once participants are assigned, she sends an invitation e-mail which lists the sessions' dates and times and includes a link to the subjects' individualized registration page. Following this link, the subject can enroll for one of the sessions available. Upon signing up for a session, a confirmation e-mail is sent to the subject.

When the enrollment period expires, the system verifies the state of enrollments for the experiment. For each session, the experimenter receives an e-mail which informs her about the number of enrolled subjects and includes an attached a pdf-file that contains a list of the enrolled participants. In case of too few enrollments the experimenter may now extend the enrolment period, or cancel the session as the last measure.

After a successful enrolment process, the experimenter conducts her experimental session in the laboratory. She enters the show-up and participation data for all subjects. When all data is complete, she marks the session as completed, and its data will be included in the calculation of reputation scores of participants. When all sessions are completed, the experimenter marks the whole experiment as completed, and it will be listed in the Completed experiments section rather than in the list of current experiments.